Texas High School Rankings

When Children At Risk first started ranking Texas public schools five years ago, it only named the top performers, wary of embarrassing educators and students at campuses that didn’t measure up.

The hesitance emerged even though widespread educational failure had prompted the project in the first place, says Robert Sanborn, the president and CEO of the Houston-based nonprofit advocacy and research organization. The rankings grew out of a conference at Rice University that focused on high school graduation and featured John Hopkins researcher Robert Balfouz, who talked about “dropout factories.”

“At first, we didn’t want to make any high schools look bad, ” Sanborn says. “But we’ve changed that over the years. What we’ve found is that [spotlighting low-performing schools] proved to be a tremendous advocacy tool for parents. They can ask, ‘Why isn’t my school better?'”

So now, the group’s rankings — including the ones we’re publishing today, for most public schools in Texas — lay out the worst schools along with the best and every gradation in between. That’s a stark contrast from the state's accountability system, which simply groups schools in one of four broad performance categories: exemplary, recognized, acceptable and unacceptable. Though Children at Risk uses some of the same data that are the basis for the Texas Education Agency's "ratings, " it does something that TEA doesn't: It gives every school a hard number that compares its performance with that of every other school.

“You see the best in the state and the worst in the state, ” Sanborn says. “This isn’t a PR campaign — they are straight-up rankings. … We used to have [district] superintendents angry with us, arguing this isn’t the right way to measure, but they’ve gotten away from that.”

Using the Children At Risk data, The Texas Tribune has built a searchable database to help parents judge schools and help educators and policymakers examine the relative performance of groups of schools and districts. And we’ve constructed a detailed page for each school, separately laying out the data used to compute the rankings of more than 5, 800 campuses.

Source: www.texastribune.org

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egreenwood11Thursday 12, November 2015 12:20 AM

@Evan Greenwood: was looking through Texas High School basketball player rankings.. there are 2 5 stars that play half a mile from the house lol